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Friday, September 2, 2016

Recent Reads

As often happens I have been waffling back and forth between what to read lately. I had started and stopped a couple of things (if anyone is paying attention to the right side of this blog, they probably noticed that). I'm very much a "mood" reader. Meaning, I need to be in the mood for something. Otherwise, regardless of how good it is, it won't capture my interest.

So, anyways, I was in the mood for some D&D-based fiction. To that end I polled all my geeky friends, just to see if they had some favorites that I hadn't read. Unfortunately, I had read the majority of their suggestions. So, I scoured the used book store shelves for something, and I landed on a volume from the series that Wizards of the Coast put out in support of D&D 3E. I have blogged about one of these before. And I have read one or two of the others, but not this one. So, I gave it a go.

This one focused on Mialee, the elf wizard, and dealt with the undead. The main villain was a wight, with a lot of abilities that your normal wight from the Monster Manual doesn't have. In reality, he was probably more of a lich than a wight, but I just went with it. The story was pretty cool, and the characters were all fairly interesting. Not a lot of characterization, but about what you would expect in a 200-pager.

The plot was somewhat predictable, but that was fine. The main purpose of these books has always been to showcase the stuff you can do in the game. So, there were some neat little things that you could easily plug into your own game. Which is really what makes these books fun for gamers to read. Honestly, this was probably the coolest marketing strategy I have ever seen for a game. I plan to collect all of them (there were 8 or so of these).

In other reading, I read a couple of Thor graphic novels, The God Butcher and Godbomb. These two collected the first 11 issues of his recent series. I had already read Goddess of Thunder, where a woman takes up Mjolnir and becomes the new Thor. I knew her identity, but it was cool to see how the story unfolded anyways.

These two took place before that, and involved a being known as the God Butcher. Very interesting story involving the slaughter of immortal beings who serve as deities across the cosmos. At one point, you had three versions of Thor fighting side-by-side, thanks to the wonders of time-travel. Over all, highly recommended.

My current reading is The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavrel Kay. One of my co-workers dropped the whole trilogy in our book-trade box, so, after some gushing reccomendations from friends, I grabbed them all up, and have started in on the first book. Haven't gotten far enough into it yet to form an opinion. But the setup is a proven winner for me, so I have high hopes.

I also started reading the first issue of Skelos last night. I had backed the kickstarter at the level that gets me every issue in eBook format. So far, so good. the first story was a bit disturbing, but seems to fit into the theme of the journal. I suspect I will enjoy the Sword & Sorcery-style stories more than the horror ones. But, that's just me.